Using an Open Source Platform to Meet Online Learning Goals

(Jane) If you haven’t seen it already, EdX has announced it
will be releasing its entire platform on GPL on June 1, and Stanford announced
it will be collaborating with them on this.

Let me tell you a story about David Glance. He wanted to
host a MOOC at university of Western Australia. When he emailed Coursera to
host a MOOC, he was rebuffed. And he wanted UWA to manage the look and feel of
the platform, and to use it for other activities, which he couldn’t do with Coursera.
And then he found out about Stanford’s Class2Go platform. He forked a copy from
Github, discussed layout with the authors, and built a UWA site. Soon, he was
contributing code. (This story is really
condescending – SD).

(Amy) When you sign up with Coursera, you benefit from your
courses being listed alongside the other courses. We think this effect will
reduce over time as there are more courses and as sites like coursetalk.org
create listings. Coursera also has a community with discussion threads,
webinars and documentation, and this week, its first user conference.

The problem for universities is that students taking courses
on the platform feel an affinity for the platform, and maybe the professor, but
not the university. Compare to the open source branding, where students are
tweeting ‘thanks Stanford’, not the platform.

Also, with a commercial platform, students may receive email
from the platform owner, that you have no control over. Also, you may encounter
re-use terms you can’t live with. You’ll want to be aware of terms-of-use limitations
on commercial platforms.

Yes, these statements are pretty oversimplified. There is a
wide range of approaches – Coursera and Udacity are for-profit platforms,
Moodlerooms is commercial offering an open platform, etc. Stanford has opted a
complex multi-platform strategy, and that works for us, as it allows us to
experiment with a variety of approaches.

Question: what’s the difference between an LMS and a MOOC
platform?

Response: (Jane) there’s a ton of overlaps – but there are
things in LMSs that MOOCs lack, like sign-up for discussion, sign-up for
field-trips, etc. LMSs don’t have sort of support for videos and auto-grading
that MOOC platforms do. We’ve seen requests from faculty for more LMS-like
features.

Question: what would you say to institutions that are
hesitant to locally host a MOOC platform?

Response (Jane): that’s why people use Coursera, they make
it easy. I’d like to see an ecosystem of third-party providers that host
open-source platforms. (Amy) The concerns around hosting your own platform have
always been a concern. But you might run into them with a third party platform
as well.

Question: Students are not in your database, like an LIMS.
What about capacity? Etc.

Response: we’ve been advising people about things like, what
size they should get if they’re setting up on Amazon. We want to help some, and
hope others will help others.

It won’t be Class2Go any more –we’ll be merging with EdX.

Question: How will this merge of platforms work? Will there
be just one entity?

Response; We’ll keep Class2Go for people who are currently
using it, and we’ll figure out what to do with people – probably migrating over
to EdX and maybe migrating some features over to EdX.

(A few responses to my question along the lines of no this
is not at all like Blackboard acquiring WebCT).

Question: what lessons have Stanford and MIT learned from Sakai?

Response: It will be a small group that is making decisions,
because Sakai there was a very long response time. What we don’t want is for it
to be a big consortium where 25 institutions all have to agree on something.